I am a poet and scholar. In both areas, my work centers the epistemological potential of poetic language, with a particular interest in the relationship between poetry and ethics.  

 

I’m the author of the poetry collection Arrow (Alice James Books (U.S.)/Carcanet Press (U.K.), 2020), which was described by the New York Times as “full of life and joy even when … thinking through violence and grief.” I’m currently at work on a second poetry collection titled The B-Sides of the Golden Record, the central inspiration for which comes from the Golden Record created by NASA in 1977 for the Voyager missions with the intent of introducing extraterrestrials to human beings and human life. The title series of the book explores the elisions in that source narrative, which also reverberate through the book’s other, more autobiographical poems. I have tended to primarily write lyric poems, although my newer work also explores experimental and visual poetics. 

 

My first scholarly book, Grave Dangers: Poetics and the Ethics of Death in the Anthropocene, is under an advance contract with the University of Minnesota Press. It argues that in emphasizing co-existing together, the field of ecological studies has not adequately centered and honored utterances of grief, as well as demands for justice, regarding the deaths of racialized people. I look to the poems of Lucille Clifton, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, M. NourbeSe Philip, Natalie Diaz, and Diana Khoi Nguyen to develop an ethical framework for Anthropocene studies that offers several strategies for caring for, and attending to, the death caused by both the racialized violence and the ecological devastations that define the epoch. My second scholarly book will explore techniques of anti-racist world-building in the poetics of contemporary Brown poets.  

 

 

Ph.D., Emory University, 2018 

B.A., Wellesley College, 2008 

 

 

Arrow, Alice James Books (U.S.) and Carcanet Press (U.K.), 2020 

 

 

“The B-Sides of the Golden Record: Track Twenty-One, ‘Ozymandias.’” Kenyon Review (Summer 2024). 

 

“The B-Sides of the Golden Record: Track Seven, ‘Love Poem with Prosopopoeia.’” Kundiman x The Offing (May 2024). 

 

“The B-Sides of the Golden Record: Track Six, ‘The Interrogative Mood,’” “The B-Sides of the Golden Records: Track Eight, ‘Alienation of Affection,’” “The B-Sides of the Golden Records: Track Nine, ‘God,’” “The B-Sides of the Golden Records: Hidden Track,” “The B-Sides of the Golden Records: Track Ten, ‘Metaphor.” The Massachusetts Review 64.3 (Fall 2023).  

 

“The B-Sides of the Golden Record: Track Two, ‘Sounds of Human Labor.’” The Quarry from Split This Rock (December 2022). 

 

“Image 002.” West Branch (Fall 2021).  

 

“The B-Sides of the Golden Record: Track Five, ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.’” Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day (January 20, 2021).  

 

“The B-Sides of the Golden Record: Track One, ‘The Canary Flies into the Mine.’” Small House Pamphlet Series #2 (September 29, 2020).  

 

“Most of the Children Who lived in This House Are Dead. As A Child I Lived Here. Therefore I Am Dead,” “Image 000,” “Image 001,” and “Image 007.” The Offing (15 July 2020).  

 

“The B-Sides of the Golden Record: Track Three, ‘Some Flowers That Have Died.’” The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly No. 26: Pop Issue (May 2020). 

 

“Image 004.” Poetry (April 2020).  

 

“Arrow” and “Essay on the Order of Time.” Blackbird 18.2 (November 2019). 

 

“Night Questions.” Stand (U.K.) 223, 17(3) (September – November 2019). 

 

“O.” Memorious 30 (July 2019). 

 

“Essay on Thunder.” The American Poetry Review (November/December 2018).  

 

“Arrow.” Connotation Press: An Online Artifact’s A Poetry Congeries (November 2018). 

 

“Basic Questions.” Glass: Poets Resist (November 2018). 

 

“O Spirit,” “O Spirit,” “Essay on Joy,” and “Essay on Devotion.” The Rumpus (May 2018).  

 

“Windows.” Poetry (November 2017). 

 

“Dear, beloved.” Poetry (April 2017). 

 

“Bear, II.” The Journal 40.2 (Spring 2016). 

 

“And death demands a labor.” Adroit 16 (Spring 2016).  

 

“Hound.” Witness XXIX.1 (Spring 2016). 

 

“Luz.” Gulf Coast 28.1 (Winter/Spring 2016). 

 

“Marigolds.” At Length (July 2015). 

 

“Spring.” Boston Review (May/June 2015). 

 

Poems have also been reprinted in New Poetries VII (Carcanet Press, UK, 2017), PN Review (Carcanet Press, UK, 2017), The Forward Book of Poetry 2019 (Faber, 2019), 100 More Great Indian Poems (Bloomsbury India, 2019), and Best American Poetry 2019 (Simon and Schuster, 2019). 

 

 

“Brownness and the Ontology of Analogy.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 10.1 (March 2024): Special Issue on “Brown/nesses,” eds. Naveen Minai, Neelofer Qadir, and Tina Chen.  

 

“Lyric Melodrama: The Hermeneutics of Viral Poems.” Poetry and Platform Cultures, ed. Matthew Kilbane. Forthcoming from Amherst College Press.   

 

“The Perfect Post-Critic?” Eliot Now, ed. Megan Quigley and David Chinitz. Forthcoming from Bloomsbury.  

 

“Anthropocene Ethics and its Lapses: Lyric Eros, Racism, and the Example of Sylvia Plath’s Bees.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE) 28.3 (Fall 2021).  

 

“Poetic Networks Begin After Death: On Lucille Clifton’s Spirit-Writings.” College Literature 47.1 (Winter 2020, Special Issue: Poetry Networks). 

 

“No” (an essay on the keyword “no” in The Waste Land). In “Reading The Waste Land with the #MeToo Generation” (collection of essays). Modernism/modernity PrintPlus 4.1 (March 2019). 

 

“Of New Calligraphy: Seamus Heaney, Planetarity, and Lyric’s Uncanny Space-Walk.” Cultural Critique 104 (Summer 2019). 

 

 

“Entanglement Revisited.” Healing Grounds: On Care and Climate Justice (art exhibition catalogue), Sarah Lawrence College (Spring 2024). 

 

“The Shape of Things.” Poetry Foundation (April 14, 2020).  

 

“Every Atom - Reflections on Walt Whitman at 200: No. 45.” North American Review (July 14, 2019). 

 

“The Trouble You Promised: Reading Tracy K. Smith.” Los Angeles Review of Books (August 26, 2018). 

 

“Carried Off to the World’s End: A Study of Alice Oswald in Five Parts.” Los Angeles Review of Books (January 3, 2017).  

 

“Violet and Violent: A Conversation with Melissa Green.” Los Angeles Review of Books (February 21, 2016).  

 

“Night Out of Many Many Bright Roses [on Rilke’s French translations].” Rain Taxi Review of Books Online Edition (Summer 2015).  

 

 

Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, North Carolina State University, 2024. 

 

National Humanities Center Summer Resident, 2023. 

 

New Writers Award, Great Lakes Colleges Association, 2022. 

 

Kundiman Poetry Fellow, 2022. 

 

Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection, Seamus Heaney Centre (U.K.), 2021. 

 

Bredvold Prize for Scholarly or Creative Publications, University of Michigan, 2021.  

 

Shortlist for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, Forward Arts Foundation (U.K.), 2018. 

 

Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, Poetry Foundation, 2017–2018.  

 

Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry Graduate Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Emory University, 2017–2018.